Ali Abdaal Went From $2.72 To $4.6M+ From YouTube… Here’s How

23:05Oh, that's cool. And you get this whole new skill set, which then serves you for the rest of your life, but also really benefits your YouTube channel or whatever the thing might be. Well, let's put up on the screen on YouTube, you're very open about how much money you make. And you show your revenue year by year. So 2017, you did$2.27, which was your AdSense revenue when you got started. But then it goes$24 ,000,$130 ,000. So I want to point out here, you're now three years in and you were a doctor. So you're in three years basically making less than what a traditional full-on doctor would make.

23:42I think you were in whatever the UK version of residency is, some version of that. But then in 2020, you jumped from$130 ,000 up to$1.2 million. What happened there in that jump? Was that you released the course? Yeah, so that was when we had a whole year of releasing classes on Skillshare, which made like, I don't know,$500K that year. Probably less than$400K. And we released my YouTube course, which was about how to be a part-time YouTuber, which is not at all what I'm known for. Like I should have released a productivity course, but I was like, ah, people keep asking me about this YouTube thing.

24:13Let me just make a course. And it was the pandemic. Live cohort courses were all the rage then with building a second brain and rite of passage and all these other cohort-based courses. So after speaking to Tiago Forte and David Perel, who ran these courses, they basically talked me into charging loads of money for a live cohort course. And then that became like, it was meant to be a bit of a side hustle, but it ended up being the majority of our revenue for the next like three plus years. And that is still the cash cow that funds the entire business basically because more than half of our revenue comes from this one course.

24:44It's now evergreen and we've got like a service-based offering on the back of it and like a higher ticket thing on the back of it. But just randomly this idea in a coffee shop of like, hey, let me make a course about how to do YouTube has now just like transformed our business completely. So that was the big jump from like 100K to a minute. 130k to 1.2 million then 4 million in 2021 4.6 i think that was the last one i saw in 2022 i think you finished a little higher than that maybe um and you're profiting you know the profit margins were very good so when you made 1.2 million in revenue your profit was 950k so like incredible profit margins i don't know what that is roughly 80 or something uh and then you you know you've done two to two and a half million of profit the last couple years um i'm curious of two things One, why do you think your course hit when so many courses fail or just fail to get the same type of traction?

25:37What do you attribute that to?

25:42Why did our course hit? I think we got really lucky. We got really lucky with the timing in the pandemic. And the thing that I would tell myself, the thing that I would do differently is just spend a lot of time crafting the offer. Like at the time,$100 million offers hadn't come out. I didn't even know what an offer was. I'd never read a book about marketing. I'd been on like Russell Brunson and Neil Patel's email list since I was like 13, but always thought they were a bit scammy. And I was like, what could they possibly teach me? It's all just scammy, clickfunnelsy bullshit. And so when we first made the course, I think we got very lucky by just the fact that it just happened to hit at the right time.

26:20When the course made real money was the final cohort. after I'd read$100 million offers, dot-com secrets, copywriting secrets, and we revamped the entire landing page, the entire offer, the entire product, purely based on the advice of what Russell Brunson and Alex Formozzi have written in their books and just literally following the step-by-step method. And that was when a single launch of the course did like 2 million in a week. Isn't that hilarious? I went to the exact same thing where I'm like, Russell Brunson, Neil Patel, scam. And then I like start reading their stuff and I'm like, no, it's not a scam at all.

26:51I think a lot of scammers consume that stuff and implement it, but it's definitely not. It's really helpful stuff. Yeah, it's incredible stuff. When I first read.com Secrets, I was like, I cannot believe I've been sitting on this for 15 years. I should have been reading all of Russell Brunson's stuff from day one. Essentially, the before and after was before when I was selling a course, I was like, oh, I'm making a course and then selling the course. It's like, right, so how can I just explain what the course is, basically? It was like a very sort of unsophisticated way of doing things. I didn't have any formula for writing a landing page.

27:23It was just like, oh, I think maybe this should go on it. I was just sort of making shit up as I went along. And two years later, when I read$100 million offers and.com secrets and explored this world of marketing a little bit more, that was when I realized, hang on, people have been selling courses online for like 20 years plus at this point. They've got a playbook. They've done all the testing. And one of the big mindset shifts was separating the offer from the fulfillment of the offer. Like the thing that people are buying is the offer and the offer needs to be a grand slam offer to the point that people feel like they're a dumbass for saying no to it.

27:54And then you can always worry about the fulfillment later. And there's something weird about separating it into those two of like, oh, okay, cool. So now when we make a course, we just focus on the offer. We're like, until the offer is amazing and the landing page is amazing, we're not even going to bother creating the course because like, what's the point? And the creation of the course will be sort of based on what the offer is based on, like, talking to users and talking to people in our audience and being like, hey, what do you need to know about productivity? And then just following a formula for funnels in terms of upsells and downsells as per the Russell Brunson method.

28:26And there's a really good book Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards. He's one of Russell's acolytes. And that's really freaking good. And I was like, oh, the headline's really important. The subhead is really important. Shit, this is the structure of a landing page. You should talk about the user's problems. Okay, let's just do that. And we did that. And that final cohort of the course did like 2 million in a week and i was like fuck i wish i'd done this earlier so my issue with the thing i've read all those books too and i think they're awesome my issue that i've always personally challenged uh struggled with is like for example in alex ramosi's book he was like for gym launch or whatever business he had he was saying like you know we'll prove that for you spend 40 grand with us and then you make 150 000 in additional revenue like we'll somehow prove that and if you don't, you get your money back.

29:12So he was like, you got to make it irresistible. So of course, you're gonna spend 40k, you'll make 150k. And I was like, Yeah, that's, that's irresistible. But I got to figure out how to do that. And that's actually quite challenging. I mean, like it was hard just to come up. I mean, I could make a landing page sound amazing. It's actually quite challenging. With the course, it's a bit easier because it's sometimes a one time purchase. And you just have to like, be like, well, here's just the information that I've got to give them. how do you bridge that gap between fulfillment and promise yeah this was another big um sort of before and after moment of it you don't that's one of your team's values is just fuck them um yeah exactly well one of the big insights from from homo homo's book was this idea of like what what's the dream outcome like what is the actual thing that you're selling and I didn't really have a sense of this when we launched the course initially and I've been selling courses online since like I don't know 2013 or something and I just never had a sense of what is the actual thing that we're selling what I realized after reading the books is with our course our YouTuber Academy the thing we're selling is time we're saying we will save you time and that is all we're saying we're not saying we're going to make you money because that's we cannot fulfill on that promise because like YouTube channels like very few succeed people have to put in the work all that crap but we can absolutely save you time and as soon as we changed all of our messaging to, hey, we just save you time.

30:38If you value your time, you should take our course because we've done all the work. Yeah, you can troll the internet and find all this stuff for free if you really want to, but if you value your time, join our course because we'll save you time. Saving time is a very easy promise to fulfill because obviously we're going to fulfill it and massively over deliver on it. And also we have a 30-day money back guarantee. If someone doesn't like it, for whatever reason, we literally just give them their money back because we don't need the money. So those two things, we save time and we give you your money back if you don't like it.

31:03that gives us all of the conviction we need that like actually this is a really fucking good product because we are not promising hey we'll make you money do you have uh so the business is going well i think in your latest video you're living you said you're living nomadically now you said you're going to do five point something million in revenue um what's do you have like a like a north star where you're like i think the business can get to here like is there a world are you one of these guys where you're like, I want to get to 50, 100 billion dollar business. Do you have an ambition and what is it and what businesses are you going to launch to get there?

31:38Yeah, that's a great question. I actually don't. And I'd love to get your guys' take on this. My North Star is when I'm dead and people are speaking at my funeral, I just want them to say, A, I was a nice dude, but B, that my stuff helped them in some way, like helped them live a better life or like I taught them something or something like that. Like my whole North Star is how do I continue being able to learn, synthesize, and teach forever? So I'm super inspired by, for example, people like Tony Robbins. He's got his downsides. But like the cool thing is he's been doing this stuff for 47 years and millions of people around the world say his stuff changed their life.

32:15That's pretty cool. Tim Ferriss has been doing this stuff for like nearly 20 years and loads of people around the world would say he changed their life. I would say Tim Ferriss changed my life. That's pretty cool. So that's the North Star. It's like, how do I just... it's that thing of like, once you're playing your infinite game, which is what I'm playing right now, like the only objective that makes sense is to be able to continue playing the game. And so I don't have any revenue goals. I don't have any profit goals. I have a bit of a profit goal. It's like, let's just make as much profit as the year before, at least, please.

32:43But beyond that, I'm not shooting for 10, 20, 50, 100 million. We are building like a SaaS product on the side that I'm a sort of co-founder in. You know, I like hearing the ideas that you guys come up with in the podcast. I'm a subscriber to Trends just to see, is there anything interesting that I can come up with here? But honestly, for me, the main thing is, how do I just keep on being able to make content, write books, make videos, do podcasts, whatever formats are going to come along in the future to be able to teach. And so being a good teacher is my North Star. Please do challenge me on that, because I don't know if I'm bullshitting myself.

33:17Well, I think you're definitely telling yourself a story, but we all tell ourselves. Whatever the answer is, it's a story. That one sounds like it serves you pretty well, so keep it, I would say. you know, it is probably worth questioning. Like if I just asked you, what would be a more true answer? I think what would be more true is I love teaching and if someone offered me an easy way to get to 10 million, I wouldn't say no to it. But if... Yeah, so there is a number. 10 million, yeah. The funeral thing I think is the part that smelled like, you know, where we borrow from others versus what's actually true in our core, like what makes us want to do something.

33:52I personally have never been very motivated by like my actual funeral. I do think it's a good signal. It's a good side effect of a life well-lived. But it's not something I would get excited about. I'm going to do this because at my funeral, this will be remembered. That sort of thing. Whereas it sounds like what you really have said is you love the learning part. You like the teaching part. You may not actually like the format you teach today, which is like YouTube videos. You kind of admitted that you liked maybe 20 of the 700 videos. you enjoyed making those, but you really enjoyed the research and the learning part.

34:27That resonates with me. I remember we did a set of interviews in LA where we tried to book bigger name guests, Mark Manson and Brian Johnson. We booked all these guests. And to do it, I was like, okay, I'm going to do the best job I possibly can. I'm going to research as deep as I can go on all these people. And I did. I spent basically two or three full days researching each of those people. If you spend two or three full days researching somebody, you have a PhD. I have a PhD in Mark Manson. I have fully researched it. I went and found he had this pickup artist alter ego back in the day, and I went and read all his stuff.

35:01And then I read his first book that nobody even talks about, Models, rather than the Subtle Art. I read all of it. And I had so much fun doing it. I didn't do three days because it needed three days. Frankly, it probably needed three hours. But I got into it, and I could justify it because I had this big interview book that we booked the studio. So I could justify doing whatever the hell I want. And so I indulged myself and just went further because I was enjoying it. Then came the actual interview. And he's a great guy. The interview turned out fine. But it was like a seven or eight compared to the fun I had in actually going down the rabbit hole myself and actually trying to learn things.

35:35It sounds like that might be true for you, too. The 10 out of 10 is the learning and the 7 out of 10 is recording the content for YouTube. Yeah, I think for me, the learning is 10 out of 10. I think teaching in real life is also a 10 out of 10. like when I go back through my life and think of the most meaningful moments like I quite enjoyed being a doctor but I enjoyed it way more when I had a medical student attached to me who I could teach along the way and you know on days where I didn't have someone I was teaching I would kind of be looking forward to going home so I could make YouTube videos but on days where I did have someone I was teaching alongside the time would just fly I wouldn't be thinking oh you know when's the day going to end I'd be thinking I fucking love this this is so fun so I want to do more like live seminar live teaching type things next year that's something we've got in the pipeline.

36:19My end of my therapy session for you is I think the actual North Star should be if your learning is a 10 out of 10 today find a way to turn the teaching into a 10 out of 10 and then you've won. Because then you're literally just doing the shit you truly enjoy in the infinite game. You can do that forever. I also think Ali that my bullshit detector was going off when you were telling me what your goals are because I think that you can have multiple goals. I think that I believe what you're saying about how you want to be remembered and all that. But I think that it doesn't sound... I think it sounds crude to say like, well, I would like to hit 10 million in revenue maybe by year eight or whatever.

37:00And I think that maybe you didn't say that because it sounds crude. But I think that that's perfectly... That's a wonderful goal. I think that with me personally, I think of this business thing, you're past the point where you have security. I think that it's the same way that when you're exercising, you're like, I want to run a 5k at this time. I'm not going to be devastated if I don't do it. But it's just a really fun goal to chase after. And I think that's the same with a lot of business stuff, which is you want a net worth by this age, or you want your business to hit this much in revenue or profit or users.

37:33And I don't think that you need to stake your personal or your self-esteem or your personal self-worth on it. But I still think it's exciting when it's like, man, this new SaaS thing I'm working on, maybe one day this could make this much in revenue. And if it doesn't, it could still be awesome so long as I enjoyed it. But that's just exciting. It's an exciting thing to shoot for. And I think that's okay to admit that. But for some reason, it seems like you didn't want to. Yeah. I don't know. The thing that excites me is... And again, this could just be a story, but it honestly is that thing of, I just want to learn and share cool stuff.

38:14And that focus on the process, focus on the things that are in my control has led to... The score takes care of itself when you focus on the things that are in your control. Let me ask you a question. You had this story about the first business you ever launched. And you were 18 years old and it didn't go well. Tell the story of this$1 ,000 business that you had when you were 18 years old. What happened? Yeah, so this was... from like age 16 to 18, I was doing some like private tutoring. I was teaching people how to do well in maths and science exams and shit. And I saved up about$1 ,000. And then I was like, okay, I'm rich now.

38:51I can buy my first Apple product. I was like, yeah, I can finally afford an Apple product. And so I went out to try and find a MacBook Air. And I bought one of some dude on Craigslist. But it turned out after it transpired that he'd sold me a model that didn't work and it was really old and I was a dumbass. So I didn't realize that he was selling me a kind of a dead MacBook. And so this$1 ,000 that I'd spent like years of my life working every week, like hours of private tutoring, like$10 an hour to get to this thousand, suddenly all that disappeared. And I was like, cool. I need to find a way to recoup these losses.

39:24I need to find a way to build a business that allows me to make this money back. And so I still have the Evernote file from 2012 when I was 18 where that happened, where I was like, okay, what am I good at? I'm good at teaching. I'm good at med school entrance exams. I know how to make websites. so let me build a business that combines all those things and that was my first business like i've been trying to make money on the internet since age 13 hence why i was on russell brunson and neil patel's email list since then but that was the first business i made that actually succeeded where i had this strong desire to do it and found this combination of things that i was already good at and then that business did like 10k year one 100k year two 150k year three and actually sold that business a few years ago to go full-time on the youtube channel um but because my youtube channel originally started off as content marketing for that original business, which was teaching courses of how to get into med school.

40:09I've probably, I don't know, in total, YouTube channel and all the stuff around has probably done over 10 million revenue. So my$1 ,000 loss, which was like felt life changing at the time, has now transformed into like a 10 million kind of upside. And I feel kind of like, that's kind of cool. Like at the time, I thought to myself, I'm going to find a way to turn this$1 ,000 loss into a really good opportunity. And that was when And that first business really, really started and took off.

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41:40Sam, have you ever had that? Have you ever had like a big L that's turned that what felt like a big L in the moment that turned into a W? you? My whole thing was just growing up where my parents controlled money and where it was like, you're not allowed to do this. Or when your parents say, well, if you're living under my roof, you're going to do this. And there's been many times where I was like, at a very young age, I was like, all right, fine. Money equals power then. And then basically everything that I've done since then has been because my parents probably... Because they said no to me a handful of times.

42:17and I said, all right, then I'm going to be completely free and money is one way to achieve that freedom. Yeah, I mean, it all stems. Basically, every great business person, I think, probably stems from some type of childhood trauma, whether it's your parents telling you no or you see your mother be poor or you get scammed out of a MacBook. When we sold the Milk Road, I asked the guys, I was like, man, you guys have been, they've just been doing different businesses for so long and they had a pretty interesting track record, like small wins, big wins, shit like that. And I was like, what's the driver?

42:54Because if you bank$100 million and you're still taking risks and starting businesses, you're not doing it for the money, I don't believe. And I was like, what's the driver? And he's like, I don't know what it is now. He's like, but for a long time, he's like, both of them had the same story. And it wasn't like, this wasn't on the podcast. This wasn't to look cool. This was like us hanging out. And he said it matter of factly. He's like, yeah, this girl rejected me when I was like 14 years old. And he's like, I literally felt like shit. And I was like, okay, like, I don't want to be rejected again.

43:25How do I make myself awesome? And he's like, I didn't know what the answer was, but I immediately started to be like, oh, I'm if I'm if I'm okay at this, I'm good at this. I'm going to become awesome at this instead. And so he's like, I was good at like the internet, making websites, stuff like that. And I just like went into overdrive. And he's like, the other guy had the same story. He's like, yeah, I lived this. he's like I had six friends and in college and they had we wanted to live off campus together and they got a house that only had five rooms and I was the odd man out and I was just like fuck these guys I'm gonna okay I'm gonna go live in my by myself but I'm gonna like I'm gonna go into the hole and I'm gonna come out a different guy what's yours Sean because you seem like you've had your act together I mean you've seen emotionally stable yeah I've had a few things like this, probably not like some huge disrespect or nothing I was that aware of, but I do remember like, I remember hearing this story.

44:18So I went to this I got into this random accelerator that I don't even know if it exists anymore. It's called the Mass Challenge. And they used to invite these speakers in. It was in Massachusetts. And one time I was at this event they had and Ben from Ben and Jerry's was there and he told this story about Ben and Jerry's about the starting story of Ben and Jerry's. There's all these interesting funny things. He starts it off being like, yeah, I met Jerry because we were both in PE class and I was like, did you guys get along right away? He's like, no, but we were both the fat kids so we would have to run the mile every day and we were just walking at the back and first we didn't talk for the first two weeks and finally it was like, alright, what's up, man?

45:01It's you again. So they became friends that way and he talks about they take this$5 one of them was trying to get into med school and he failed the entrance exam five or six times in a row. So like, you know, he basically for several years couldn't get into bed school. And so they instead took a$5 ice cream making course together. And that's like, you know, part of how they learned how to make ice cream for Ben and Jerry's. So they opened up this shop and it wasn't like pints like you see today. It was a shop, but it was in Vermont in the freezing cold winter. And so they're about to go out of business like in month three because nobody wants ice cream when it's already snowing outside.

45:38It's like a blizzard outside. And so they, you know, they, they're all right, what do we do? We're screwed. So what do we do? And they had this, they came up with this promotion. It's like this long acronym, like nine letters long. And it stood for one cent off per degree Celsius under, you know, freezing or whatever. And so you got like 12 cents off if it was 12 below freezing. And so they, and that like, that promotion was funny. People liked it. So they like came and like pitied them and basically bought a little ice cream, took them through the winter. so then they're like still struggling and they started the strategy of like making pints they're like oh let's go to restaurants and give them the pints because otherwise it's just going to melt here nobody's coming to our shop and eventually they get into corner stores and they start selling and finally the business is working and they're like oh my god this is great we sell we sell pints to these corner stores and they sell our product for us this is a good business and then one day stopped getting orders from a whole area where they lived.

46:36And they were like, what the hell happened? They go and they talk to the store owner. He's like, guys, I didn't want to tell you this, but I got word from Big Ice Cream. He's like, what? He's like, yeah, Haagen-Dazs came to us. And Haagen-Dazs, which is owned by Pillsbury. Pillsbury sent us this letter, said, I don't know who this Ben and Jerry is, but you need to stop selling their stuff. Only sell Haagen-Dazs, or we're pulling all Pillsbury products from your shelves. He's like, dude, I need my Crescent rolls. I can't do this, guys. I'm so sorry. And so the guys are like, shit, we're screwed.

47:05But they had this value, which was like turn the disadvantage into an advantage. And so they were like, all right, how can we use this? And so they created this whole campaign called What's the Doughboy Afraid of? And they would print these posters that were like the pint of Ben and Jerry's with the giant Pillsbury Doughboy hands about to strangle it. And they would just say, what's the Doughboy Afraid of? And then on every pint of ice cream they sold, they said, we're under attack. Call this number to hear the story about what's going on, why Pillsbury is trying to put out your favorite ice cream brand.

47:39And then they recorded like an answering machine that would just tell the three minute story and say, like, if you think this is screwed up, buy these stickers and buy a pint of ice cream just to, you know, show Pillsbury you won't be bullied. And eventually the New Yorker takes the story and, you know, Jerry standing outside of Pillsbury's headquarters by himself picketing as if he's a protester. and they take this picture. They've run this in the New Yorker and Pillsbury has to like completely back off because it looks terrible for them as a brand to be doing this. And secondly, a whole bunch of people found out about Ben & Jerry's that didn't know about it before because this story was a lot more interesting than just, here's a cool ice cream brand started with these two hippies in Vermont.

48:16And so then they exploded in sales and they became successful. And I remember hearing that. And so everything that would happen in our first business, like we were, you know, 20 years old, basically trying to start the sushi chain. Everything that would happen, And we get rejected or we get a cease and desist letter or whatever it was. We were like, this is our Pillsbury moment. All right, what's the doble afraid of? How do we flip this? And so very quickly, it went from like anything that was bad. We got hype because it was like, this could be our story that we're telling someday. And that just became like embedded in my mind.

48:47And so I almost don't even remember the individual like kind of like rejection moments because it was all like, all right, how are we going to use this to go viral? How are we going to use this to our advantage? And that's just like, I don't know what I've been doing for like 15 years since. By the way, Ali, welcome to my life. So I asked Sean a question. He tells me this amazing story where I'm totally enthralled. I was into it. He does such a good job of telling the story. And I'm like, I don't even know what to say. I'm interested. Yeah, I like fall down this slope. But I'm like, I don't remember what I asked.

49:19But like, what else you got? Keep telling me. Tell me another story. I want to learn from you, Ali. I want to learn about titles. So I think that one of the reasons your course does so well is that it's not called, you know, how to be famous on YouTube. It's called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. And part-time, I think, just appeals to a whole different segment of people. And I always think about these choices because when you see the title, what you don't see is the 50 other options that were considered. And I think about this with your entire channel. like if I go to your YouTube channel right now and I let's say popular right some of your titles are just really good how I type really fast all caps and then 156 words per minute or how I ranked first at Cambridge University the essay and the thumbnails you're holding up like this notebook that looks like it's got the secret instructions inside or my evidence based skin care routine so even though I said you weren't the most beautiful guy you got good skin and you but saying my evidence-based skincare routine is so different than just saying my skincare routine um i'm curious what's your method to madness on getting good at titles or how you come up with the stuff yeah nice um we think a lot about titles what we found basically is that the only thing that allows us to predict the performance of a video is just the title it's not even the thumbnail some people like thumbnail but like in an educational channel my thumbnails look broadly similar.

50:46It's very rarely the thumbnail. It just tends to be the title. If we know that if the title is good, then by default, the content is going to be at least reasonable and useful. That's our main thing is like, is this useful? And so the video is going to fly or flop based on the performance of the title. How do you know the title will be good though? By the way, that's the same offer. Separating the offer from the delivery of the offer is the same principle, right? Exactly. It was the same thing for the book. You know, it took like about 100 iterations to land on feel good productivity. as like the thing.

51:16I've still got my Apple Notes file with like hundreds of title options trying to get at this idea of like being productive in a nice, fun, joyful sort of way. And the title actually came to me in the shower, like two years into the journey of writing the book. Just on that note, one thing I would do differently next time is any future book that I write, I would make sure I've got the title nailed before trying to write the book because the title informs the concept and the hook, which informs everything else. And there was so much like surgery we had to do on the book. once we came up with that title to be like, oh, okay, that's the title.

51:47So now let's rejig everything in the book to make sure it matches the promise, the offer, the title, and the thumbnail of the book. But when it comes to YouTube videos, we just do a lot of iteration. He's like, how do you know a good title from a bad? When you're trying to decide, obviously it's just a judgment call over time. You get a bunch of intuition, but is there anything you do or anything that led you to be better at titles? Yeah, we do a lot. we have the strategy that we cutely called viral replication which is that the way you grow a YouTube channel is by getting a viral video and the easiest way to get a viral video is to just copy the title of another video that's already gone viral so a lot of our best titles have been just looking around on YouTube sometimes within our niche sometimes outside of our niche and looking at the view to subscriber ratio of that particular video so like back in the day I saw some guy made a video like how I use my iPad as an engineering student I was like okay interesting but that video had like 2 million views and the dude had like 20 ,000 subscribers.

52:45I was like, huh, that's interesting. There's something about that title that's really popped. So I thought, how I use my iPad as a medical student. Sounds cool. So I made that video and that was the first video on the channel that went viral. I'd go to over a million views. I was like, huh, I suppose this works. Six billion views and it's how I take notes on my iPad Pro in medical school. Is that the one? Yeah, that's the one. And that was about a year into my channel. Are you using software to help you do this or are you just browsing? We're browsing, we're using vidIQ, the Chrome extension, which shows us the subscriber count of the channel just next to their name, because otherwise you have to click on it and see what the subscriber count is.

53:20We've also now started becoming more sophisticated with A-B testing, titles, and thumbnails. So we use thumbnailtest.com, which is made by one of our Twitter friends, to just test the shit out of the back catalog. And that generates a bunch of free views basically every day because we can refresh an old video that's like three years old by just giving it a new title or a new thumbnail. And it's a lot of like repeating that process over and over again. Before landing on a title, we often have like 20 titles to choose from. And sometimes if we're really not sure, we'll like test it on Twitter and on Instagram and on YouTube community post.

53:52We'll say, hey, which of these four titles would you be more likely to click on? And often there's like a clear winner. And we're like, okay, cool. Let's just do that. And we make sure we don't even think about writing the video until we have nailed a title. Because obviously, like the framing of the title and thumbnail radically informs the way you can do the video. our producer by the way i just saw her look down she's like taking notes on how we can improve our channel what's the um what's the software bit you're fooling around with because i bet you've seen a lot of interesting creators launch cool businesses i bet you've had a lot of opportunities run by you why did you settle this one and what is it yeah so this is uh we're actually launching like this week uh it's called voice pal and it's like a a voice notes meets ai transcription meets converting your voice note into like a summary, which you can then turn into a tweet thread or a LinkedIn post or a journal entry or whatever you want.

54:44It's not launched yet, voicepal.me. For whenever people are listening to this, it will have been launched by then. This is an idea I've kind of had floating in the back of my mind, partly thanks to listening to your guys' pod for a few years, which is that creators have a massive distribution advantage, but do not know how to make products. Product people know how to make products, but really struggle with distribution. So in theory, if you can combine those two things, if you can pair a creator with a product that fits their audience nicely, now you're winning because the product guy makes a product and the creator has the distribution.

55:16And so I partnered up with a friend of mine who's a second-time founder. He's exited like two, well, third-time founder. He's exited two companies. And he was like, hey, we should totally build some cool productivity software together. And I was like, yes, we absolutely should. And so the first idea that we're launching is this thing called VoicePal, which is like, yeah, you record a voice note and it transcribes it and it can turn it into whatever you want. And we're trying to figure out the messaging around this. Double your productivity using your voice. Something to that effect. And we're going to be launching this week for our 1 ,000 beta testers and I'll post it on Twitter and LinkedIn and the newsletter and hopefully we'll just get those 1 ,000 people very quickly.

55:49How much are you in charge? We're thinking like$10 a month initially. We've already got like 20 paying users from the Alpha friends and family test that we did where we sort of found 30 people, 20 of them were super, super power users and almost all of them converted to paid when Pablo, the co-founder, reached out to them to be like, hey, would you like to buy early access to this? And a lot of people are using it already for journalists and lawyers and stuff for recording depositions and things like that. A bunch of people are using it for journaling as well. So one thing that I'm really bullish on is to your point about, wouldn't it be cool to get to 10 million revenue?

56:25I think the way we get there is I don't try and get there through content, but we try and get there through building cool software products on the side that I use personally, that I would like, oh, I would fucking love a journaling app that does this. I'd love a to-do list app that's different to things and to-do lists by doing this and this. I think that's so smart. And then we plug it to our audience. I think I would agree with that theory of you're not going to get to where you want to go by doing the content revenue itself. Have you guys seen the app Opal? So it's opal.so. It's like... No.

56:54Man, you guys got to check this out. So opal.so. So it says, find your focus, make the most of every day with the world's greatest screen time software. So the problem with iPhone software is that, you know, like the screen time thing, you can just click like bypass or whatever. So somehow these guys made it to where I can't bypass. So between 8 or 9 and 6pm, I cannot go on social media on my phone. And they've done it in such a way that like I literally can't bypass it. And it's like$120. They've got a crazy amount of reviews. and I think that what I think is going to happen is I think there's already a lot of these but these like screen time focus session apps I think historically have done pretty good so there's a few ones for the past couple years there's Chrome plugins for this but this one in particular is the only one that stuck with me I have no idea who these guys are this isn't like a promotion I just thought it was cool I could see you launching something like this I think they charge$200,$300 for a lifetime license and then$100 a year.

57:59But I really like, if I'm you, I would just look at what are the best apps out there for productivity? Who's spending the most on advertising? And how do I acquire a small part of their company or launch something similar? Because I don't have to... My margin will be their advertising budget. Yeah, that is exactly the way we're thinking. We're sort of thinking of it as a sort of barbell strategy where there's a couple of companies that I've invested in to get like a small equity stake in the company. Rise is one of them, R-I-Z-E. They're like another focused time tracking type thing that I've been using for like two years.

58:35And so we invested in them, but we invested sponsorship dollars. So like however much it was, like four sponsorships worth of investment into the company. And it's great because I use it every day. I love it. It's easy to recommend. And when I say I've invested in a thing, it's like people are like, oh, he liked it so much he actually invested in it. So that's for a small equity stake. And then on the other side, we're trying to do these sort of co-founding software product for like a 20 or 30 % equity stake. So I'm trying to experiment with both. But I'm particularly bullish on like building our own shit because I think that's where I get to mold the direction of the product in a way that personally suits me.

59:09And one of the cool things about that is like, what I love trying to find is apps where I can share a screenshot of the thing, which promotes the app without it looking like a promotion. So for example, whenever I do a workout, I use the app Strong and I just screenshot it and post it on my Instagram story. And I will always get like dozens of comments being like, what app is that? And it annoys me because I'm like, this is an app I don't own. And it's just really good. But if I did own the app Strong or a workout tracker and I was just posting screenshots of my workouts, no one would think I'm plugging a product.

59:41They would think, oh, he's sharing screenshots of his product. So I'm always looking for these organic promotion opportunities that don't look like they're apps. Or like another one is Scribner. Is that what it's called? I know you love that app, that writing app, which I think it's just like a guy in like Montana or something like, you know, a little bit random like that who owns that writing tool. But you should acquire stakes in these businesses or launch some of their own. And I think you'd be very successful at that. Yeah. Yeah, one thing I've been thinking a lot is that with a lot of these productivity apps, they tend not to be differentiated on the product itself.

1:00:17like fundamentally all to-do list apps do the same thing. And when you watch reviews of them, it's like, oh, well, Things 3 has slightly nicer animations and Todoist has like Teams. And this one is available on iPad. So you should get that. It's like the product features that differentiate these are so small. So if we could, in theory, just clone one of these in our own way, in our own design language, whatever, and we've got feature parity on the product side, we would have a distribution advantage. And the market for these productivity apps is so huge that a few users would be pretty good. How many users to, let's say if you owned Scrivener or Opal, how many users could a handful of your videos drive, do you think?

1:00:59Probably thousands to tens of thousands based on what the users are that we drive to like Skillshare and Brilliant and these other like sponsoring type things. If there's a good fit with the audience, then yeah. There was a time where Sean brought up some company that does accounting or his taxes on the pod. Um, and then afterwards he asked, he, I don't think Sean, you didn't have any, he didn't, he had no stake. He was just like, I just met this guy and it was cool. And I ended up using the product and it was interesting. Here's what it was. And then he like hollered at them two weeks later and was like, did you see a bump?

1:01:32And the guy was like raving, you know, I don't know what numbers I'm allowed to say or not, but Sean, you could decide if you want to say it or not. But it was like a substantial sum. Uh, and then that Calendly was booked out like four months or something. I don't know if they didn't have a lot of slots or what happened, but that was great for them when that happened. But then we both had a lightbulb moment and we're like, oh, there's something there. You know what I mean? Now, of course, you have to pick and choose which ones you do and you can't do too many at one time. You probably should only do one at a time for a certain amount of time.

1:02:05But yeah, we had that same moment as well. So one thing that we did, So we recently launched, well, recently, a few months ago, a studio called Hey Friends, which is like a... Yeah, with Hunter and Sahil. Yeah, with Hunter and Sahil. Oh, yeah, because you guys are working with them as well. And one tweet from me, and yeah, just like one tweet, drove 2 million MRR worth of leads that they're still going through the sales calls and trying to shore up capacity because there's so many people wanting this 14 ,000 MRR worth of leads. Wow, okay, that's a shit. Yeah, there were literally hundreds of people that signed up for a 14 ,000 a month sales call and they were like, shit, we can only onboard one or two people a month because we need to hire editors and script writers and all this kind of stuff.

1:02:49And it was just like one tweet. And Twitter isn't even my main platform. But I guess it's where people like you guys are more likely to read a tweet of mine than watch a video. So if I'm like, hey, I've got this 15K a month YouTube as a service thing, it's like that drove so many leads. And we're like, huh, that's interesting. That's a short capacity now. We did this thing, I think two years ago, Sean, or maybe a year ago, where we were like, okay, so we understand how there's these billion dollar businesses built on Instagram. That's been done maybe a couple of times with the Kardashians and a handful of other people.

1:03:22It's very plausible that it's happening or has already happened with YouTube, Mr. Beast, and there's many more that have built businesses that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even more on YouTube. It hasn't happened yet with Twitter. And our prediction was like, this is going to happen more. And the reason it's going to happen more is because A, there's a business audience on Twitter a bit more than those other platforms. So you can sell higher priced things. And B, the conversion is quite high. So I don't know what the click-through rate on your video. So how many people click a link to your products?

1:03:52It probably is less than 1%. On Twitter, it's not crazy to be 5 % at times where you post a link and 5 % of people click it. And we're like, wow, we could just drive way more traffic to a website. It hasn't happened yet. I think it's in the process of happening. Hopefully, Sean and I and a couple of our friends are in route to doing that. But I think it's going to happen in the next five years. Who's even Twitter famous? I can go on YouTube and Instagram and I know like, oh, I don't know who Charlie D 'Amelio is, but I know that that's a person that's TikTok famous. Started on that platform, got huge on that platform, has a huge fan base on that platform.

1:04:27You could say Dan Bilzerian and others were doing that on Instagram when Instagram first came out. and on YouTube you had whoever, tons of people, Mr. Beast and others. I don't even know who that would be on Twitter. Who the hell is Twitter famous? Sahil maybe? Is our friend Sahil the most Twitter famous guy on earth? That's the biggest no offense to Sahil. Sahil's great but shouldn't it be a famous person? Shouldn't there be whoever? Mr. Beast is massive. PewDiePie was massive. These were massive, massive creators. Who is that on Twitter? I don't even know. Like, is there? And I'm on Twitter all the time.

1:05:03You. I guess you or our friends. I don't know. It can't be. I think it also really... Why does it not have that? That's insane. I think it also really depends on what audience you're going on. Like, normal people have never heard of Sihel Bloom. The only people who have are the people who are in our sort of, like, business. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So, like, who's the mass market? Like, you know, on Instagram, it was, like, beautiful people went... They were the mass market famous people, right? And then on YouTube, it's like the funny vlogger types on Twitch it was like the best Fortnite player in the world alright Fortnite's super popular makes sense that Ninja's super popular Dr.

1:05:37Disrespecting these guys Shroud whoever I don't even know who those people are on Twitter who is like is it Elon is he the only guy who is like famous on Twitter oh yeah Trump they were famous off Twitter which is why they're big on Twitter like is there anybody who's just natively so good at tweeting that they just got huge because if not something is broken about this platform it's not broken my point is it's small it's small so how many people how many users does twitter have i don't know three or four hundred million yeah yeah a fraction compared to what the other platforms have so it's just small um and also it's text-based so it's a little bit less exciting so like uh and you don't exactly see like the view count like you do on youtube so i see ollie's video that has six million views and i'm like oh many other people know this person i'll see a tweet just randomly through my my feed and i don't necessarily it's more one-to-one versus one to many.

1:06:28So I don't know that other people are consuming it, but that's okay. No, there is no famous people, but that's okay. I think you can still build a big business because there's people like Ali or you or I on there who will spend more money. Twitter's like 20 years old. If it's not big now, it's never getting big. It's a 20-year-old product. There's 300 million people. Who's more than 10 million followers? Who is not already famous? Like Trump and Elon, take them out, that has more than 10 million followers organically? I don't know. like I know video accounts that got popular right like that's insane to me maybe it's like a couple yeah there's maybe some of these like crazy you know like F Jerry like is there even like an F Jerry type of account on Twitter I don't know I don't think so I'm sure there is somebody who knows is just yelling at their podcast player right now like why aren't they saying blah blah blah the obvious so we're all friends with the most famous guy on Twitter so I'll play yeah congrats what is it that you say a dwarf amongst midgets.

1:07:26Yeah, that's basically what's going on here. Well, and the only reason he's famous is because he's Indian, so he has a billion potential fans, and he's ripped, so he's already going to attract all the dudes. By the way, it's never women that are attracted to the ripped dudes. It's always other men like me who see a ripped guy. And he talks about productivity, so he's got this whole other angle. So he's a triple assassin. He's Indian, so he gets Indian followers. He's not Indian. he's also half Indian so he's super hot also yeah amazing combination of things dude if he had Ollie's accent it'd be over yeah if he had a British or a London accent and was sounded all proper he's got it all he's uh he'd be a he'd had everything um Ollie thanks for doing this man the name of the book what is it feel good productivity it's coming out in January or December 26th right yeah December 26th feel good productivity it's about I'll do more of a to you in a way that's enjoyable meaningful sustainable yeah yeah did you not know that most gifts are bought literally three days before that exactly ah shit good point there was there was this whole like astrology that the publishers did where they were like well if we go before christmas we're competing with cookbooks and like celebrity memoirs and those are often gifted over christmas rather than like self-help books but if we go just after christmas people are on a new year new me kind of thing so maybe that's when it'll hit.

1:08:51I'm not sure how much of this was astrology versus actual data, but they seem pretty switched on, so maybe there was some data behind it as well. And your cover looks like an Airtable spreadsheet. The cover, okay, here's the thing with these sorts of books. The reason Atomic Habits were so successful is because it was picked up by the demographic of women in their 30s in the Midwest, apparently, which is by far the biggest demographic of people who buy books, and especially people who buy self-help books. And it really hit that crowd sometime in the pandemic. The Kinzys of the world. A bunch of ladies named Kinsey.

1:09:26Yeah, that kind of thing. You know, they've got two kids. That kind of stuff. And so the publisher was like, look, productivity is too bro-y. We need to have a cover that will be a bit more gender neutral, feel a bit more like kind of fresh and inviting. And that's why productivity is like... By Alison Abdal. Yeah, good point. Yeah, sounds about right. but that's why the cover is all like bright and colorful and so that's also my vibe I like bright and colorful well the landing page is beautiful it looks good man you're gonna kill it congratulations on all this thanks man thanks for giving us shout outs and we'll have to repay you in some way when your book comes out and we'll share but we appreciate you coming on and we'll wrap up here that's the pod I feel like I can rule the world I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on the road let's travel never looking back

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